Path 20

The twentieth path joins Chesed, Mercy, to Tiphareth, Beauty, descending the right side of the Tree from the sphere of loving-kindness to the harmonising centre. It carries the letter Yod, the smallest of the Hebrew letters, little more than a point, from which in the Kabbalistic teaching all the other letters are formed, the seed and origin of the alphabet, and the first letter of the ineffable divine name. Its name means "hand".

In the Sefer Yetzirah Yod is one of the twelve simple letters assigned to the twelve zodiac signs, and it is given to Virgo, the virgin, the mutable earth sign of discernment, service, harvest and the careful attention to detail. The attribution of the letter to Virgo belongs to the ancient Jewish scheme in which the twelve single letters correspond to the signs and months; the tiny, precise, seed-like Yod, the point from which all proceeds, suits the analytic and discriminating character of the virgin sign.

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Hermit, and the pairing is among the most fitting in the system: the Hermit, the solitary figure with the lamp, the card of withdrawal, inner search and the wisdom found alone, answers to its zodiacal sign Virgo, the sign of solitude, discernment and service, and to the letter Yod, the point of light and the hand that holds the lamp.

The Golden Dawn read the Hermit as the seeker who carries the hidden light of the higher self. The correspondence of letters to trumps was proposed by Eliphas Levi and fixed by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as recorded in Liber 777. The layers must be kept distinct. The path from Chesed to Tiphareth, the letter Yod, and its attribution to Virgo are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the identification with the Hermit is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian Western esoteric overlay of 1888, no part of the Jewish tradition it drew upon.